Man with shotgun leaves scene when police show up; When shots are later fired, he says he was shooting at an armadillo

Willow Springs resident Nikolay Plyushchev is being held in the Ozark County Jail without bond after Ozark County Prosecuting Attorney John Garrabrant filed a felony charge of unlawful use of a weapon against him.

Plyushchev was arrested and arraigned on May 21. He is scheduled to reappear in court before Associate Judge Raymond Gross at 9 a.m. June 15. 

Online records show that an immigration detainer has also been filed in the case. 

 

A combined effort 

According to the probable cause statement prepared by Ozark County Deputy Justin D. Brown, the Ozark County Sheriff’s dispatch office received a call at 6:58 a.m. May 21, from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department, who relayed a report of four men near the Brixey/Rockbriddge Volunteer Fire Department (VFD) acting suspicious. Because the VFD was inside Ozark County, an officer from this area would need to respond. 

The DCSD told the Ozark County dispatcher that they’d dispatched Douglas County Sheriff Chris DeGase to the scene also, because they didn’t know if the men would travel into Douglas County from where they were. 

As Brown drove toward the VFD, he overheard a conversation on the radio in which DeGase told the dispatcher that he had three subjects detained and another subject had walked away.

Brown arrived on scene and spoke with DeGase, who told the officer that Plyushchev, who was armed with a shotgun, had left the area before he could be detained. 

 

Armadillo shots

As Brown was on scene, he heard a shotgun discharge about 50 yards from where he was standing, the report says. About a minute later, the officer spotted Brown walking north on Highway 95. He was taken into custody and identified as Plyushchev. 

“I asked Plyushchev where his gun was, and he stated that he tossed it in the ditch just south of our location,” Brown wrote in the report. “He later showed me where he left the gun… it was under a cedar tree approximately 50 yards from where he was taken into custody.”

The firearm, a Remington 870 Super Mag shotgun in a camouflage pattern, had one loaded round in the chamber and two loaded rounds in the magazine, the report says. 

Brown asked Plyushchev what he was shooting at, and the suspect reportedly told him that he was on the roadway when he saw an armadillo, so he decided to shoot at it but he’d missed it. 

 

A criminal history 

and a dead sheep

Brown says he ran Plyushchev’s criminal history through his law enforcement software, and he had been arrested for 12 counts of assault on a law enforcement officer, four counts of resisting arrest and another county of felonious restraint. He was later convicted of three counts of resisting arrest and sentenced to prison for 11 years, making him a convicted felon unable to legal possess firearms. A Facebook post made on the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department page indicates that officers found a green leafy substance and drug paraphernalia in the car. 

They also reportedly found a dead, field-dressed sheep with an ear tag in the vehicle’s backseat. 

Ozark County Times

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